Twitter’s X Platform Struggles with Displaying Old Posts: Photos and URLs Missing

X, formerly Twitter, is having trouble displaying old posts with photos and URLs. It appears to be tweets published before December 2014. It is unclear when the problems started.

Photos and certain hyperlinks are no longer visible on X since last weekend, reports, among others, The Verge. The problem was noticed Saturday afternoon by X user Tom Coates. The posts only show broken hyperlinks, but no more media. Tweets with videos will still work.

The problem appears to be caused by a glitch in Twitter’s own link shortener, which automatically converts URLs in posts into a t.co hyperlink. Old t.co links no longer seem to work. Photos in the old tweets are still on Twitter’s servers, but are no longer displayed on the platform itself. Among other Ellen DeGeneres’ famous Oscars selfie, which has been retweeted millions of times, temporarily disappeared from the platform. That photo has now been restored. A photo in a response to that tweet however, is still not visible.

It is not known what exactly causes the problems with t.co links and photos. It may have to do with changes Twitter made in 2016, notes The Verge. In that year, the platform received ‘improved URLenrichment‘. This will show previews of linked websites and photos in a tweet without those previews counting towards the 140 character limit in X messages. The metadata for that change began “emerging” in December 2014, according to developer documentation.

X has not officially commented on the glitch. Tweakers has questions outstanding with X, but the company has not yet answered them.

2023-08-21 12:50:52
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